If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

When I had chicken pox as a kid, my Dad brought me home a bag full of comics. Eerie and Uncle Creepy, and some other rather macabre stuff. The only mainstream comic in the lot was an issue on Manthing and he/it has been with me ever since. I guess he is my gay cowboy. I just can't quit him. HAH!

Eerie and Creepy magazines were amazing. My favourite stories were El Cid...the ink work and the dynamism of the bodyforms was stunning.

I was originally hired to physically carve the balls in urethane foam.Each ball had a corresponding tread pattern from Bridgestone's high performance tires. There was 4 weeks of fabrication and finishing allotted in the shooting schedule. Though I still love carving, there was just no way to carve five prototype balls,with tread patterns diving toward the poles of the balls. If you have ever had to do a layout on a round or roundish object, then you know what a nightmare it can be. The 4 weeks included all of the molding, casting, and painting, along with all of the art direction changes that go with any job. I convinced my employer, Chris Hyde at Global Entertainment Industries, to do the whole job digitally, and produce the parts on a 3D printer.

I modeled each ball in Zbrush, and used GoZ to Maya and Photoshop, Dynamesh (life saver on this job), Polypaint, UV Master, Decimation Master, and 3D Print exporter. I used Rhino for post processing of the .STL files. Everything was printed on A Zcorp 620 full color printer. Yeah, yeah, I know, the surface is pitted and rough....But not on a full sized ball. A bit of light sanding, some touch up paint, and some logos....Viola!

Thanks!

Todd - Thanks, I think the whole ad campaign is brilliant and different from the standard " See close up of tire devour the road" ads.

Nikholax - It is always a blast to see something you've done emerging from a printer. Most of my career has been creating props and sets for film and Theme Parks. I do love creating in a 3D environment too. Same process with different tools.

Chalkman - As always, thanks for your support.

Drakelot - Thanks. You should check out the whole lot on YouTube!

Maury - Thanks! Rapid prototyping is coming on stronger and stronger. The prices are coming down and new systems are emerging every day. My best friend has an Objet Allaris as part of his tool arsenal. Most of these parts were printed on the big Zcorp machine, and others were printed in nylon on an SLS machine.

Laying out the UVs was the most time consuming part of this whole process. I grouped the different areas of my base model and unfolded them with UV Master. I shot them over to Maya via GoZ and laid the UVs out in a rectangle. That way I didn't have to try and warp the tread pattern to fit the original lay out ( I did use that method at some point, but the pattern had too much distortion in it ) By constraining the UVs into a rectangle, it reliably forced the tread texture to evenly "dive" in on itself. It is certainly nothing new, but for me, it was the best and fastest way to get there.

I used the new texture map to mask my model, and then used the inflate slider in the Deformation palette. There is always some noise and stretched polygons in the mesh after this process. I attacked that by first duplicating the mesh, switching to the duplicate, Dynameshing the model, and then reprojecting onto the original. My last step was just going over the whole thing with the H polish brush and chasing over the surface. I will knock together a little tutorial on this, if anyone would like to see it.